Cleaning house

   Sorting through the detritus of years, I came across a notebook holding a collection of my writing assignments over the years, including that posted previously.  In ninth grade, we read "Evangeline," the Epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and were assigned to write a one-page summary of it, which is the above post.  My paper was graded 100, but it left me with a lot of questions.  So I reread the poem, and when it's called Epic, that does indeed mean epic; there are 2 Parts and each has 5 (V), lengthy Cantos, written in dactylic hexameter form.   Longfellow must have spent a good portion of his days fitting his tale into poetic meter:  "This is the forest primeval."  
     I'm sure I read the entire poem because it was assigned, and when I was 13 and 14 years old, I always did my homework, and especially in English class.  That's probably how I know that a kirtle is a skirt because Evangeline wore a blue kirtle, and how I knew that Loup-garou inhabits forests, and that the White Letiche is a fearful spirit.  But I'm pretty sure I didn't understand at that age that the British were  not the only villains in the evacuation of Acadie, and that other political components came into play.  But this is Longfellow's fictional account, his poem, so he is not entirely responsible for the misrepresentation of history his poem inspired. 
    I'm equally sure that I was nowhere near understanding the full meaning when I read back then about Gabriel's death after a lifetime of the two lovers searching for each other, to be re-united only at death.  "Sweet was the light of his eye, but it suddenly sank into darkness as when a lamp is blown out by a gust of wind at a casement. "
   I can't fault my teenaged self  for lack of insight. It is not possible to fully comprehend love, life and loss until you yourself have traveled, "bleeding and barefooted over the shards and thorns of existence."